Beverages, such as soft drinks and beer, are routinely contained in metallic cans. For shipment and storage of filled cans, it is common to package the filled cans in corrugated cardboard containers, typically containing 24 cans per container.
At first, corrugated cardboard cartons completely surrounding the cans were employed. More recently, however, in a cost reduction effort, the full corrugated carton has been replaced with a corrugated cardboard tray, which may extend, for example, approximately 1/2 the height of the cans held therein, with a heat shrinkable plastics resin film covering both the cans and the carton.
A problem inherent in the storage of the stacked cartons of filled metallic cans is the inevitable failure of one or more of these cans, causing leakage of the beverage contained therein. If the leaked beverage is held by the carton, the corrosive nature of the beverage often attacks other containers within that carton, in turn causing more failures. Eventually, there is a high probability of sufficient failures of adjacent cans such that collapse of these containers, due to the weight of cartons of containers stacked thereon results, leading to a catastrophic failure of a large portion of the stacked containers in, for example, a warehouse, common carrier vehicle, or the like.
The nature of the business is such that the beverage manufacturer relies on the can manufacturer to guarantee the quality of the cans, and looks to this can manufacturer should damage in transit or storage result. The can manufacturers, therefore, seek to minimize the damage that may result from defective "leaker" cans.
One way to minimize the danger of leakers, which was commonly employed when unwrapped cartons were employed to contain cans, was to form the cartons, as originally die cut from sheet stock, such that when folded, small openings resulted in each bottom corner of the carton. When such cartons were stacked, should a can leak, the beverage would not be held by the carton, resulting in the potential corrosion of adjacent cans, but would naturally tend to flow out of the carton through the openings, where it would evaporate, substantially reducing the change of corroding adjacent cans.
While this system was effective when fully surrounding cartons contained cans, the advent of plastic wrapped cardboard trays as containers for multiple cans covered any such holes which were formed in the cardboard tray, eliminating this potential source of beverage dissipation.
It would be desirable, therefore, to regain this effective means of dissipating leaked beverages from stacked cans, while at the same time maintaining the cost effectiveness of the plastic wrapped tray for metallic cans.